“I am glad that you are still here,” he said heartily.  “Excuse me while I bathe and change.  We will dine a little earlier.  So far I have not eaten to-day.”

“A long trek?” Dominey asked curiously.

“I have trekked far,” was the quiet reply.

At dinner time, Von Ragastein was one more himself, immaculate in white duck, with clean linen, shaved, and with little left of his fatigue.  There was something different in his manner, however, some change which puzzled Dominey.  He was at once more attentive to his guest, yet further removed from him in spirit and sympathy.  He kept the conversation with curious insistence upon incidents of their school and college days, upon the subject of Dominey’s friends and relations, and the later episodes of his life.  Dominey felt himself all the time encouraged to talk about his earlier life, and all the time he was conscious that for some reason or other his host’s closest and most minute attention was being given to his slightest word.  Champagne had been served and served freely, and Dominey, up to the very gates of that one secret chamber, talked volubly and without reserve.  After the meal was over, their chairs were dragged as before into the open.  The silent orderly produced even larger cigars, and Dominey found his glass filled once more with the wonderful brandy.  The doctor had left them to visit the native camp nearly a quarter of a mile away, and the orderly was busy inside, clearing the table.  Only the black shapes of the servants were dimly visible as they twirled their fans,—­and overhead the gleaming stars.  They were alone.

“I’ve been talking an awful lot of rot about myself,” Dominey said.  “Tell me a little about your career now and your life in Germany before you came out here?”

Von Ragastein made no immediate reply, and a curious silence ebbed and flowed between the two men.  Every now and then a star shot across the sky.  The red rim of the moon rose a little higher from behind the mountains.  The bush stillness, always the most mysterious of silences, seemed gradually to become charged with unvoiced passion.  Soon the animals began to call around them, creeping nearer and nearer to the fire which burned at the end of the open space.

“My friend,” Von Ragastein said at last, speaking with the air of a man who has spent much time in deliberation, “you speak to me of Germany, of my homeland.  Perhaps you have guessed that it is not duty alone which has brought me here to these wild places.  I, too, left behind me a tragedy.”

Dominey’s quick impulse of sympathy was smothered by the stern, almost harsh repression of the other’s manner.  The words seemed to have been torn from his throat.  There was no spark of tenderness or regret in his set face.

“Since the day of my banishment,” he went on, “no word of this matter has passed my lips.  To-night it is not weakness which assails me, but a desire to yield to the strange arm of coincidence.  You and I, schoolmates and college friends, though sons of a different country, meet here in the wilderness, each with the iron in our souls.  I shall tell you the thing which happened to me, and you shall speak to me of your own curse.”